A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973) Reviews

Pretty Christina (Christina von Blanc) encounters ghostly apparitions when she travels to a mansion in Honduras for the reading of her father's will. Thinking that she is going mad, Christina investigates further and discovers some horrible family secrets which could consume her. This witty erotic horror effort from cult director Jesus Franco is a perfect example of the re-editing and butchering of European films, which became common practice in the 1970s. At least 10 different versions exist, some with completely different plots than others. A 1974 re-release contained softcore sexual inserts featuring Marie-France Broquet, Waldemar Wohlfaart, and other performers not present in the original version. In the 1980s, French director Jean Rollin was hired by the Eurocine studio (by far the most common offender in the area of "cut-and-paste filmmaking") to shoot additional scenes. Rollin's footage consists of approximately 15 minutes of gory, uninspired zombie attacks, meant to capitalize on a then-popular subgenre initiated by Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2. Yet another version contained scenes from a Rollin-directed vampire film and was advertised with a picture of Vincent Price, who does not appear in any known version of this film. Further complicating matters is the fact that most of these alternate versions exist in varying lengths, reducing a rather interesting film to an incomprehensible mess. Britt Nichols, Paul Muller, Howard Vernon, and Anne Libert co-star, and Franco appears in a cameo role excised from some prints. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi